Brad Watson to read from current book

Monday

For a book that takes a life-altering birth defect as its main premise, Brad Watson's novel “Miss Jane” is surprisingly tender.

For a book that takes a life-altering birth defect as its main premise, Brad Watson's novel “Miss Jane” is surprisingly tender.

Born with a genital deformity, the novel's heroine, Jane Chisolm, is challenged but never defeated by her abnormality.

Watson will read from “Miss Jane” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Hub City Bookshop in downtown Spartanburg. This event is free.

Twenty years ago, Watson's first collection of short stories, “Last Days of the Dog-Men” was published to wide acclaim. His debut novel, “The Heaven of Mercury” was nominated for the National Book Award in 2002. Like that novel, “Miss Jane” also takes place in the fictional town of Mercury, Mississippi, based on Watson's own hometown of Meridian, Mississippi.

Just as "Mercury" is a version of Meridian, Watson based the title character in “Miss Jane” on a member of his extended family.

“I saw my great aunt, Mary Ellis Clay, just once when I was 6 or 7,” Watson said. “She seemed very old, frail, dressed in Sunday black. That's the way I remember it, anyway.”

Watson's aunt Mary, who went by her nickname of Jane, was widely known to have some kind of medical condition, but the exact nature of her ailment remained a mystery.

“My cousins said, 'Something is wrong with Aunt Jane,' but we didn't know what,” Watson said. “Later, I learned she suffered some kind of birth defect that had made it impossible for her to have a romance, marry, have children.”

Through equal parts research and speculation, Watson determined his aunt probably suffered from a persistent cloaca, where the rectum and urinary tract form one common channel.

“It took me a while to realize I couldn't write the book until I figured out what most likely had been her condition, best I could. I had a hard time finding out about and settling on a condition that seemed to make sense,” Watson said. “It didn't seem to be a common anomaly, something relatively easy to repair in her lifetime.”

While the deformity can be corrected with surgery today, there were no available treatments during the Great Depression, when the novel takes place. Watson was intrigued by his aunt's ability to not only survive, but live a relatively normal life, especially given the social constraints of the time.

“My mother told me Jane had been popular with the boys and went to dances despite her incurable incontinence,” Watson said. “I not only wondered how that had happened, but what the consequences must have been when she grew older and had to pull away from that.”

Watson is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Wyoming. When asked if he struggled to recreate the South while living in the west, Watson cited his previous Mississippi novel, “The Heaven of Mercury,” but said there were other difficulties.

“I traveled home whenever I could, walked the country where my mother and my great-aunt grew up,” Watson said. “It's not so difficult to write stories set in my hometown, but since this was set in the country on a farm, the separation of living in such a radically different place was more of a challenge.”

In the novel, Jane experiences heartbreak and a fair amount of hardship because of her difference. Through Watson's meticulous writing, however, Jane is neither victim nor hero.

“It was a challenge to imagine what it must have been like for Jane to live a normal life despite the obstacle of being so different in her day,” Watson said. “I admired my aunt's apparent success, and so I wanted to imagine how my character Jane may have done it herself.”

In a recent review of the novel, The New York Times applauded Watson's craft, writing, “A writer of profound emotional depths, Watson does not lie to his reader, so neither does his Jane.”

Although their encounter was brief, Watson's aunt left an indelible impression on the writer.

“There was a mystery about her,” Watson said. “She seemed very admirable to me.”

“Miss Jane” retails for $25.95 and is available for purchase at the Hub City Bookshop.

For more information, visit www.hubcity.org/events or call 864-577-9349.

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